Authentication, Authorization and Session Management in Traditional Web Apps and APIs

Question

Correct me if I am wrong: In a traditional web application, the browser automatically appends session information into a request to the server, so the server can know who the request comes from. What exactly is appended actually?

However, in a API based app, this information is not sent automatically, so when developing an API, I must check myself if the request comes from an authenticated user for example? How is this normally done?

Answer 1

HTTP Protocol is stateless by design, each request is done separately and is executed in a separate context.

The idea behind session management is to put requests from the same client in the same context. This is done by issuing an identifier by the server and sending it to the client, then the client would save this identifier and resend it in subsequent requests so the server can identify it.

Cookies

In a typical browser-server case; the browser manages a list of key/value pairs, known as cookies, for each domain:

• Cookies can be managed by the server (created/modified/deleted) using the Set-Cookie HTTP response header.
• Cookies can be accessed by the server (read) by parsing the Cookie HTTP request header.

Web-targeted programming languages/frameworks provide functions to deal with cookies on a higher level, for example, PHP provides setcookie/$_COOKIE to write/read cookies.

Sessions

Back to sessions, In a typical browser-server case (again), server-side session management takes advantage of client-side cookie management. PHP's session management sets a session id cookie and use it to identify subsequent requests.

Web applications API?

Now back to your question; since you'd be the one responsible for designing the API and documenting it, the implementation would be your decision. You basically have to

1. give the client an identifier, be it via a Set-Cookie HTTP response header, inside the response body (XML/JSON auth response).
2. have a mechanism to maintain identifier/client association. for example a database table that associates identifier 00112233445566778899aabbccddeeff with client/user #1337.
3. have the client resend the identifier sent to it at (1.) in all subsequent requests, be it in an HTTP Cookie request header, a ?sid=00112233445566778899aabbccddeeff param(*).
4. lookup the received identifier, using the mechanism at (2.), check if a valid authentication, and is authorized to do requested operation, and then proceed with the operation on behalf on the auth'd user.

Of course you can build upon existing infrastructure, you can use PHP's session management (that would take care of 1./2. and the authentication part of 4.) in your app, and require that client-side implementation do cookie management(that would take care of 3.), and then you do the rest of your app logic upon that.

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(*) Each approach has cons and pros, for example, using a GET request param is easier to implement, but may have security implications, since GET requests are logged. You should use https for critical (all?) applications.

Answer 2

The session management is server responsibility. When session is created, a session token is generated and sent to the client (and stored in a cookie). After that, in the next requests between client and server, the client sends the token (usually) as an HTTP cookie. All session data is stored on the server, the client only stores the token. For example, to start a session in PHP you just need to:

session_start();  // Will create a cookie named PHPSESSID with the session token

After the session is created you can save data on it. For example, if you want to keep a user logged:

// If username and password match, you can just save the user id on the session
$_SESSION['userID'] = 123;

Now you are able to check whether a user is authenticated or not:

if ($_SESSION['userID'])
    echo 'user is authenticated';
else
    echo 'user isn't authenticated';       

If you want, you can create a session only for an authenticated user:

if (verifyAccountInformation($user,$pass)){ // Check user credentials
    // Will create a cookie named PHPSESSID with the session token
    session_start();
    $_SESSION['userID'] = 123;
}

Answer 3

There are numerous way for authentic users, both for Web applications and APIs. There are couple of standards, or you can write your own custom authorization / and or authentication. I would like to point out difference between authorization and authentication. First, application needs to authenticate user(or api client) that request is coming from. Once user has been authenticated, based on user's identity application needs to determine whatever authenticated user has permission to perform certain application (authorization). For the most of traditional web applications, there is no fine granularity in security model, so once the user is authenticated, it's in most cases also and authorized to perform certain action. However, this two concepts (authentication and authorization) should be as two different logical operations.

Further more, in classical web applications, after user has been authenticated and authorized (mostly by looking up username/password pair in database), authorization and identity info is written in session storage. Session storage does not have to be server side, as most of the answers above suggest, it could also be stored in cookie on client side, encrypted in most cases. For an example, PHP CodeIgniter framework does this by default. There is number of mechanism for protecting session on client side, and I don't see this way of storing session data any less secure than storing sessionId, which is then looked up in session storage on server-side. Also, storing session client-side is quite convenient in distributed environment, because it eliminates need for designing solution (or using already existing one) for central session management on server side.

Further more, authenticating with simple user-password pair does not have to be in all case done trough custom code which looks up matching user-record in database. There is, for example basic authentication protocol , or digest authentication. On proprietary software like Windows platform, there are also ways of authenticating user trough, for an example,ActiveDirectory

Providing username/password pair is not only way to authenticate, if using HTTPS protocol, you can also consider authentication using digital certificates.

In specific use case, if designing web service, which uses SOAP as protocol, there is also WS-Security extension for SOAP protocol.

With all these said, I would say that answers to following question enter decision procedure for choice of authorization/authentication mechanism for WebApi:

1) What's the targeted audience, is it publicly available, or for registered(paying) members only?
2) Is it run or *NIX, or MS platform
3) What number of users is expected
4) How much sensitive data API deals with (stronger vs weaker authentication mechanisms)
5) Is there any SSO service that you could use

.. and many more.

Hope that this clears things bit, as there are many variables in equation.